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Art corresponds to the human tendency to self-destruction. When a person wants to create, has inspiration, he or she destroys herself, surrendering to his or her interactions with chaos. Art denotes chaos, and opposes itself to established meanings and orders. And our desire for death, or self-destruction, is associated with our fondness for chaos and the transgression of established meanings and orders. It is not that much about how art affects the mental background but about how art is a way of interacting with what attracts us and what destroys us psychologically.
Julie Reshe interviewed by Svetlana Gusarova. Translated from the Russian by Duane Rousselle.
Another word for “dregs” is “lees,” the gritty residue left over when the wine glass is all but drained, and I was reminded of a bleak Cioran epistle: “Having verified all the arguments against life, I have stripped it of its savours, and wallowing in its lees, I have experienced its nakedness. I have known post-sexual metaphysics, the void of the futilely procreated universe, and that dissipation of sweat that plunges you into an age-old chill, anterior to the rages of matter.” Dregs‘ objective may be to allow us to experience that nakedness of existence, Burroughs’s “frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.”
Laurence Thompson reviews Chris Kelso‘s The Dregs.
But — and here’s the key — in addition to this new approach to the main vocal, using collage rather than character study, Remain in Light contains a secret weapon — its backing vocals. It is the use of backing vocals on the album that gives it the weight of truth, the veracity of human experience. They are the album’s Greek chorus, offering an alternative commentary to the main narrator. My contention is that, taken together, the vocals and backing vocals on Remain in Light contain nothing other than the secrets of the universe and, making such a huge claim, I’d like to look in some detail at how the backing vocals work.
Richard Skinner revisits Talking Heads‘ masterpiece.
The interesting critic should breathe into that “certain pain arising…” because there are the riches — when one can’t say for sure, we might be better off with awe and acceptance of limitation, as in Frank Kermode’s describing two lines of Wallace Stevens as “among the most beautiful in Stevens and I do not know what they mean.” I don’t go to a review for a plot recap, I want to know what the art did to someone’s soul — show me tire marks!
Greg Gerke interviewed by Garielle Lutz.
© Mikael Buck
These works resulted from training an Ai image generation algorithm with my asemic writing – the outputs from the algorithm I then used as raw material for these pieces. This is something I have been experimenting with recently using photography and I wanted to see how this technology would interpret asemic writing. In a nutshell these algorithms ‘dream’ up images for you based on the library of imagery that you train it with. This is a technology that will most likely be extremely prevalent at some point in the not too distant future. How quickly it will develop, who can say, but when it reaches fruition we can expect that it will be almost everywhere, and before long we will forget that it’s there.
In the 117th of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Mikael Buck.
The next person who wags his finger at me is going to get it bitten off, A. Schopenhauer thought.
Short fiction from Nathan Knapp.
To change things you have to examine them first; to deface them, all you need is a lick of paint. The black labourer – a portrait of an unknown model by a not-yet-known artist – was never much noticed to begin with, and now he has been blued out altogether. This knee-jerk attempt to cancel history in one go has nothing to do with anti-racism and everything to do with tokenism. Historical amnesia relies on people’s tendency to paint the exploited and their exploiters with the same brush.
Anna Aslanyan revisits an earlier piece written in lockdown.
Chon is more interested in how the myth of the Donald is just the latest iteration of America’s preference for stories over reality, its inability to wake up, shake itself and get its shit together. Bonneville’s Pizza Galley fantasies, his father’s wack-job rantings, Mesman’s craving for acceptance: they are all of a piece. America, Chon argues, that country built — like countries everywhere — on violence, displacement and loss, consoles itself with narratives of its unique, God-given swagger, a shining city on a hill. But Chon also shows these myths need renewing, and so America’s alt-right darns them with new strands.
Alex Diggins reviews Jeff Chon‘s Hashtag Good Guy with a Gun.
Most of Enriquez’s short stories end with this sort of cliffhanger, or just barely an idea of an ending; enough of one that the reader can create their own darkly tinted future for the characters. This does not detract from the stories, rather it reinforces the influences at play on Enriquez’s work, and emphasizes the way in which she turns classic tales of horror on their heads, reconfiguring the endings we expect from these sorts of stories.
Teddy Burnette reviews The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Maria Enriquez.
In the beginning I approached visual poetry with the sense of needing to find a narrative, but then I found the more powerful, more liberating flows, arose when the rational mind went quiet and spontaneity was allowed to guide the hand, without the interruptions of teasing thoughts trying to force a pattern. The pattern could weave itself, the artist as perplexed and inspired by the resulting object as anyone. In this sense, in retrospect, I perceive a degree of automatism in the approach.
In the 116th of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Thomas Helm.